to everything. What I've done with this life, what 1'd meant not to do, or would have meant, maybe, had I understood, though I have no regrets. Not the broken but still flowering dogwood. Not the honey locust, either. Not even the ghost walnut with its non-branches whose every shadow is memory, memory. . . As he said to me once, That's all garbage down the river, now. Turning, but as the utterly lost- because addicted-do: resigned all over again. It only looked, it- It must only look like leaving. There's an art to everything. Even turning away. How eventually even hunger can become a space to live in. How they made out of shamelessness something beautiful, for as long as they could. the months before the crime but could not say what he was doing in Politkov- skayàs neighborhood on the afternoon of October 7th. He'd been seen at a birthday party that night; this he now remembered fondly. "I came into the café and there was all this food and so I said, 'Hey, Happy Birthday! Congratu- lations!' And then I ate all the food." When he was asked how it was possible that he could remember what he'd been doing in the evening and not what he'd been doing during the day, Ibragim thought of a joke. "I'll tell you why: I ate so much food at that birthday party, I forgot everything!" Everyone laughed, though unhap- pily. Later in the trial, the lead prosecu- tor, responding to another outburst of laughter in the court, reminded every- -Carl Phillips one that they were at a murder trial. Sometimes it felt like a murder trial; most of the time it didn't. O utside the courthouse, the countrj s ongoing financial crisis had put some life back into the tiny government opposition. Its supporters declared the last day in January "a day of dissent." Ral- lies were organized, some permissions were refused, and, as usual, the Kremlin allowed itself some larger counter-rallies. Arrests were made. The next day, a Sun- day, a memorial meeting was held for the young lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, and the Novaya Gazeta freelancer who d been shot. The Politkovskaya trial had created a schism in Moscow liberal circles. On one side were people who felt they'd seen this show before: two Chechens in the dock; dubious evidence; well-publicized arrests. It was just like the trial of the alleged kill- ers of Paul Klebnikov, the Forbes journal- ist who'd been shot outside his office from a black Lada in July, 2004. Even the investigator of the case was the same, and those accused had been acquitted. On the other side was Novaya Gazeta, the loud- est opposition paper in Russia, which be- lieved that this time, at least, the author- ities had done their job. Partway through the trial, Novaya Gazeta's deputy editor, Sergei Sokolov, exasperated by the media coverage, held a "briefing" for journalists. Few came away convinced. Everyone was at the memorial meet- ing: the human-rights campaigners who thought the Makhmudov brothers were innocent, and editors from Novaya Gazeta, who thought they were guilty. It was the coldest day of the year, five de- grees Fahrenheit, and at the public square Chistye Prudy speaker after speaker got up to talk about the work that the lawyer Markelov had done on behalf of nascent independent unions, opposition journal- ists (he had defended Politkovskaya against charges of libel), and anti-Fascist activists. "The cops aren't shit!" a tall young man in sunglasses from the group Antifa, which engages in fistfights with Nazi gangs on the streets, declared. 'They come to our meetings and get them on video" -there was, in fact, a beefY man with a camcorder standing up on a height and scanning the crowd with his cam- era-"but when it comes to protecting us they're too afraid!" An eco-activist spoke about one of Markelov's clients, the journalist Mik- hail Beketov, who had tried to fight an attempt by city officials to run a major highway through the forest north of Moscow. In mid-November, Beketov had been attacked in front of his home. The attackers crushed his fingers and skull and broke his leg. Then they left him in the cold; when he was finally taken to a hospital, more than twenty- four hours later, he was in a coma and the leg and several fingers had to be amputated. Some of the speeches were fiery, most were quieter. "Look around you," said a thickset young man in glasses, with a big bright-orange hat that came down awk- wardly over his eyes. "Look at the faces of the people around you who are out here THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2009 47